Sennheiser headphones aren't cheap (certainly not 1/5th the cost, 75% is more like it) and have their own built-in marketing cost. Sennheiser advertises heavily as well. Sure they are good headphones, but they play the exact same game Beats does.

Don't over-value the Dre name. Sure I like NWA as much as the next guy, but if MC Ren released a headphone that was total shit, people would call him on it. Consumer Reports wouldn't give the headphones sounds good/too expensive type reviews.

Obviously Nike profits, and some shoe margins are stupid-high, but in general I'd say the quality of Nike shoes is far higher than what you'd find for $15. Payless shoes hurt to wear and fall apart quickly.

Beats headphones generally get positive reviews, even if they're not considered top in their field. I've listened to them at electronic stores and was impressed. Maybe you can get somewhat cheaper headphones that are better, but certainly cheap headphones aren't as good. Consumer Reports magazine said as much.

Instead of asking Slashdot such a silly question you could also just google getting a gsm sim card in the us.

Lo and behold!

#1) "The best Prepaid SIM Cards"
#2) "SIM Cards - Best Buy"

It's been trivial to do this for about a decade and 5 seconds of googling got me the answer. This is one of the stupidest ask slashdots ever, and they are almost all incredibly stupid. I'm not looking and I'm going to guess tImothy put this story up.
checks the top of the page
Yup. Fuck timothy.

You might as well say "don't be cheap, hire a photographer to take the pictures." Obviously while rights management for CC pictures is a small difficulty, raising the funds to pay for photographs is a large difficulty that has its own headaches and expenses.

I don't know why the URL no longer works. http://www.engadget.com/2014/0... might be a good replacement, it mentions the net neutrality issue.

S5 is smaller, better screen (even if it's .1" smaller), better camera, faster, has a micro SD slot, replaceable batter better build quality (my wife recently got the S5 over the similar Nexus 5). Water resistance is kind of cool, I've heard of people destroying their phones that way.

Not that the G2 is a crap phone, I just think something you spend a lot of time on is probably worth spending an extra $.35/day or whatever that works out to.

How has "redskin" turned into a term of honor or a word to be proud of? Nobody would ever say it now, unless it's in a historical context or when talking about the sports team. It's an archaic, vaguely racist term from a time when Indians were generally depicted as war-like savages. It's like a Chinese person saying "Chinaman" is a term to be proud of,

And I think you'll find not all Indians are offended at the drop of the hat, or non-Indians aren't. If you really are Indian you have very weird self-identity issues.

but not a lot of people are buying them on Amazon

Yup. The top two selling phones are Windows, so obviously Amazon top-100 sellers are not representative of larger trends in the marketplace.

If we're actually going to use logic on this... You're likely to drop/break that phone in the first 6 months.

I've never broken a phone. If 6 months was the expected lifetime, I'd pay extra for some kind of insurance plan.

Chinese phones work on unlocked GSM and work fine on AT&T, TMobile, or all the various cheap monthly plan services.

$400 LG G2s are nowhere near as good as a $650 Galaxy S5, though. I can't tell strangers how to spend their money, but personally most people I know, and myself, use their cell phone enough that it's worth spending an extra $250 spread out over the course of two years.

And whether you have a 2-year contract or not is basically not a factor, my wife and I don't, and it seems T-Mobile and AT&T have both made monthly plans the focus of their marketing. I just said 2 years because that makes it about a dollar/day and sounds like a reasonable length of time to hold on to a phone.

A lot of people spend a lot of time on their phone. Maybe 30 minutes or more. If your phone lasts you a couple years, paying a dollar a day for a phone that is (and let's be honest) substantially better is probably worth it.

If you don't use your cell except for emergency phone calls, yeah what the hell, get whatever's cheapest.

Yeah sure, the camera's auto-settings can do a better job with instant results. And a computer can do calculus equations lickety-split. The point isn't to have students take the best pictures possible, but to have them learn photography.

The lenses for a Nikon FE will work fine on a current Nikon DSLR. If they were prime lenses, the optics are about the same as with modern lenses.

Many problems with your scenario...first of all, commercially grown bell peppers (and other vegetables) are not all of the exact same variety. Sure, there's more popular varieties, but different climates and soils call for different varieties. They use different peppers in California than they do in Minnesota (and it's not just economy of scale - California climate and soil is favorable to bell peppers).

Also, even within the same variety of plant, there are genetic differences, even if they're very similar. A doomsday virus that kills one variety of bell pepper isn't likely.

Also, have you ever looked in a bell pepper? There's a lot of seeds. Should a miracle happen and (say) Anaheim Bell Peppers no longer can be grown, it would be easy for another variety to take its place very quickly. There are seeds banks around the world, private growers, etc. The extinction of most varieties of bell peppers just is not going to happen.

Farmers don't re-seed from their own crops, and (in the first world at least) haven't done so for 70-80 years. So the fact that most farms choose to raise the most popular variety of peppers in a non-factor into the genetic diversity of the crops.